Japanese Patent No. 5088278 discloses an object detecting method in which a distance from a distance sensor to a point located on an edge of an object is subjected to Hough transform to cast votes in Hough spaces and the position and the attitude of the object are detected based on the point having the largest number of votes in the Hough spaces.
However, in such an object detecting method using Hough transform, the number of votes in Hough spaces is enormous, resulting in a problem that the amount of processing required for detecting the position and the attitude of an object excessively increases.